One afternoon, Aydin and I climbed the worn stone steps that led to the center—my first visit of many, as it was the meeting place of choice for many Kurds. We entered a dark, smoky room crowded with small tables, around which dozens of serious, bright-eyed, mostly young men and women were gathered—drinking tea, smoking, and passionately discussing things Kurdish. To one side was a shop that sold Kurdish CDs and books, while in back and upstairs were theaters, a recording studio, workshops, and offices.
The Mesopotamia Cultural Center was established in 1991, just after the ban on the Kurdish language was lifted, and it had branches in about a half-dozen other cities. Yet the centers were constantly being closed down, accused of “disseminating separatist propaganda,” with the main Istanbul branch itself in danger of being shuttered at the time of my visit, pending a court decision. In the meantime, however, business was proceeding as usual, as hundreds of Kurds congregated daily in one of the few large Kurdish centers allowed in Istanbul.
And this, I would discover, was one of the curious things about Turkey’s Kurdistan. For all the country’s harsh repression, there was a tremendous amount of activity going on. Though it might have taken the Kurds of Turkey longer to get there than the Kurds of Iraq and Iran, they had become a politically mobilized people. In Iran, the Kurds I met had seemed much more subdued, while the Iraqi Kurds were now in a different stage, with organization coming more from above than from below. In Turkey, grassroots workers were everywhere, toiling tirelessly for more Kurdish rights, often at great personal risk. Their passion reminded me of the middle-aged KDP and PUK officials I’d met in Iraqi Kurdistan, those who risked everything for the Kurdish struggle.
I was also in Turkey at an unusual time, having arrived just six weeks before the November 2002 parliamentary elections, which would bring to power the Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist party. The election would take the world by surprise, as it swept out the entrenched old guard and gave Turkey a one-party government for the first time in years.
That afternoon, Aydin and I met with the Mesopotamia’s director, Zubeyir Perihan, and a half-dozen musicians, filmmakers, and actors. We gathered together in a creaky office beneath a poster of Sarya, an actress who died for the Kurdish cause.
The musicians described constant harassment—of being arrested following concerts, of being charged fifteen times the going rates at recording studios, and of having to choose the words to their songs with great care, lest they be accused of inciting separatism. Their hero was Şivan Perwer, the most famous of all Kurdish singers, who defied the Turkish state in the mid-1970s by singing Kurdish songs in a public stadium, causing the crowd to go wild. Thousands of police stormed the stadium, but Perwer’s many fans helped him escape to Germany.
The actors spoke of being arrested after one 1997 performance and imprisoned for forty days, though they had permission to stage the play, and of a civil servant who lost his job for attending the performance. And a filmmaker, Sevaş Boyraz, told of making a short film with his colleagues called The Land, about forced migration from the villages, and entering it in the 1999 Ankara film festival, where it was accepted. Until, that is, the president of the festival saw the film and prevented its screening. Öcalan had just been arrested; the atmosphere in Turkey was tense. The Ministry of Culture then also banned the film, and it was still illegal in Turkey, though it had been screened in thirty or forty international film festivals.
Sevaş’ hero was Yilmaz Guney, the director of Yol, or The Road, a film set in the Southeast that shared the Palme d’Or award at the 1982 Cannes International Film Festival. Guney wrote the film’s script while in prison for a murder that he apparently did commit. He smuggled the screenplay out and it was filmed under the direction of his collaborator, Serif Goran. Yol was banned in Turkey until 1992 but, for various financial and technical reasons, was not shown publically until 1999, when it was screened around the country—an apparent sign of a loosening political climate.
One of the best-known artists challenging Turkey’s censorship policies at the time of my visit was musician and composer Sanar Yurdatapan. With other artists, writers, and intellectuals, Yurdatapan—who is Turkish, not Kurdish—had devised an unusual, and devious, campaign of producing a constant stream of pamphlets (forty-two by late 2002) that deliberately flouted Turkey’s censorship laws. Each pamphlet was produced by dozens of joint publishers, meaning that the Turkish judiciary had to initiate separate trial procedures against each and every publisher for each and every booklet—a time-consuming process that resulted in much negative publicity for the Turkish authorities and, often, acquittal for the publishers, though Yurdatapan had been imprisoned twice for brief periods. As Yurdatapan later told me, chuckling, “Every year on January 23, our ‘birthday,’ we publish a pamphlet, cut a cake, and send pieces to the judges, to the police. This will be the start of the end of military rule in Turkey.”
ON A DESOLATE hill on the outskirts of Istanbul, in an area known as Bagcilar, stretched a poor neighborhood cobbled together out of rough cement apartment buildings, hovels built of clay and sticks, dirt-streaked mosques, and litter-speckled empty lots in which boys played soccer. To reach Bagcilar from the city center took two hours by multiple buses, a trip that some of its residents took daily, to work or to look for work.
Arriving in Bagcilar one morning, Aydin, our interpreter Sedef, and I met three women by prearrangement. We wound our way back through dirt streets, watched by skinny men in baggy pants and old women in dazzling dresses, white muslin covering their heads. The atmosphere was tense, the result, someone said later, of constant police surveillance and occasional raids. The neighborhood was home to many PKK families.
Climbing several flights of stairs, we entered an echoing, unlit apartment, where we were welcomed by more women, teenagers, and children, and ushered into a spartan living room. Around its edges sagged broken sofas, while on the walls hung black-and-white photographs of fathers and sons—thick hair brushed back, dark eyes shiny, frames draped with black. I could have been back in northern Iraq.
Our hosts were an extended family, originally from villages near Bitlis, in the heart of the Southeast, who had migrated to Istanbul in 1994, after their villages were burned. Most were middle-aged women, dressed in floralpatterned gowns and long vests similar to the ones I’d seen in Dohuk. The Kurds of Dohuk and those of southeastern Turkey share a similar dress, food, and traditions, as well as the Kermanji dialect. The women’s lovely muslin head scarves edged with lace were an almost exclusively Turkish custom, however. Some of the head scarves covered only the head, while others wrapped around the head and the chin, turning faces into cameos.
We took seats, as teenage boys and girls bustled in with glasses of tea, and one boy sat down in the middle of the room with two teapots, at the ready for refills. Other children, women, and relatives crowded into the room. Faces blended into one another, as our hosts began to talk, their words translated first from Kurdish to Turkish by a young woman for Aydin and Sedef’s benefit, and then from Turkish to English by Sedef for my benefit, an unwieldy process and constant reminder of the language divide between the Kurdish generations.
Fatma, a strong-featured woman dressed in blue and green, spoke first. “One night in 1994, the Turkish gendarmes knocked on our door, tied up my husband, took him to the river, and shot him,” she said matter-of-factly. “He was the fifth and last man to be killed in our village that day. They took all the gold jewelry in the house and put a gun in my baby grandson’s mouth. They said they would kill him, too—he would grow up to be PKK. But they let him live. They pushed everyone into the center of the village. Tanks surrounded us, and we thought we would be killed. Instead they burned our houses and fields, and took all our animals. We went to the next village, where people helped us, and later, we came to Istanbul. We came for work, but there is no work.”
“Do you get any aid?” I asked.
Fatma laughed curtly. “No. The government does nothing, a
nd we have no foreign aid organizations here.”
I thought of the many Anfal victims I had met in Iraq. Fatma’s story mirrored theirs. But the Iraqi Kurds had the whole world in their corner, while the Kurds of Turkey had no one.
Nazdar, an equally strong-featured woman, spoke next. “My husband was a shaikh, and one day, the Turkish police arrested him—they said he was helping the PKK,” she said. “They tortured him, pounded nails into his feet. After four months, they let him go. They told him not to leave the house. But he went to the mosque—he thought he could go to the mosque—and the gendarmes came and killed him. . . . The next day, the police ordered me to sign a piece of paper. I can’t read, but I was afraid and I signed. The paper said my husband’s death was a suicide.”
Nazdar’s daughter then joined the PKK. Age seventeen, the girl left the house one afternoon to visit a neighbor and never returned. Nazdar hadn’t heard from her in five years. “And now our village is burned. Where will she go if she comes home?”
Mesut, a slight young man, had been twelve years old when the family fled to Istanbul. As a child growing up in the village, he’d watched friends a few years older than he pressured into supporting the government, arrested after guns were planted in their homes, or kidnapped by the PKK to become guerrillas. In school, his teachers, who spoke only Turkish, constantly praised the legacy of Atatürk, and beat those children who didn’t go along. “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk,” the teachers made the students say, repeating the country’s favorite maxim. The teachers also harassed students who wore Kurdish clothes, and encouraged children to spy on others and report those who spoke Kurdish.
Sedef and I exchanged glances. As an Azeri Turk, she was as far removed from and disturbed by the Kurdish stories as was I. Like most Turks, she knew next to nothing about what had been happening in the Southeast over the past two decades. The war had not been covered by the Turkish press and, even now, was rarely written about in any depth.
“Do you want to go back to your villages?” I asked our hosts.
“Of course,” they said. They hated city life, and they missed everything about their villages, from their orchards to their animals. But they could not go back unless they signed a piece of paper saying that their villages had been destroyed by the PKK, not the Turkish gendarmes, and this was something they would never do.
“How do you feel about Öcalan now?” I asked. I’d heard that the PKK leader’s decision to declare a cease-fire following his arrest in 1999 was deeply resented by some of his followers, who felt they’d lost too much to settle. And other Kurds, or so I’d read, blamed the PKK as much as they did the Turkish state for all they had suffered—an impression that I would gradually learn was badly out-of-date.
There was an awkward pause and nervous glances toward the door. Not because of any ambivalence, but because Öcalan’s name wasn’t usually brought up so openly. It wasn’t safe; people could always be listening. Even now, the police could drop by any time, to question what I was doing here.
“Apo is still very close to us,” said one of our hosts.
“I would go to the mountains and fight with him myself, except my eyes are not so good,” said a grandmother, and the room burst out with laughter.
ABDULLAH ÖCALAN, BETTER known to his followers as “Apo,” or “uncle,” was born in 1948 in the southern province of Urfa, a mixed Kurdish-Turkish area. The son of a peasant, raised in the Kurdish village of Ömerli, he grew up speaking Kurdish but forgot most of it as a teenager. “I think and plan completely in Turkish,” he once said.
After attending a technical high school in Ankara on a state scholarship, Öcalan entered the prestigious Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University in 1971. Here, he mingled with other young, disaffected Kurds and Turks, with whom he organized a Maoist group whose goal was a socialist revolution in Turkey. Dropping out of college, he moved back south to Diyarbakir. In 1978, with eleven others, he held the first PKK congress. In stark contrast to the earlier tribal-based Kurdish movements of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, this Kurdish party was a left-wing ideological group, based on Marxist-Leninist principles, whose targets included not just the state’s forces but also the Kurdish aghas and landlords “representing the chauvinist class.” The PKK declared that there could be only one solution to the Kurdish question—a completely independent Kurdish nation-state, to be obtained through whatever means necessary.
In September 1980, the Turkish military staged its third coup in twenty years. By then, Apo and his followers were gone, to Syria and the Bekaa Valley, where they set up boot camps for young volunteers. Focused as much on political indoctrination as on guerrilla warfare, the camps attracted Kurds of all socioeconomic classes and both sexes from all over the world, though the vast majority were poor and Turkish. The war tactics that recruits learned were brutal, while their own lives were held in light regard; Apo once told an American journalist that the PKK could “afford to lose” 70 percent of its recruits in battle within a year of completing their training. Öcalan himself took up residence in Damascus, driving to the camps in his Mercedes, surrounded by bodyguards.
The PKK launched its first successful cross-border operation in 1984, attacking two military outposts in Turkey’s southeast. Other successful raids soon followed, often carried out by less than ten rebels at a time. They targeted the Turkish forces and its “accomplices”—i.e., Kurdish landlords, and, later, village guards, or civilian militias recruited from tribesmen loyal to their progovernment chieftains.
Meanwhile, the Turkish gendarmes harassed Kurdish villagers by the tens of thousands, subjecting many to torture and harsh prison terms. This often had the opposite of its intended effect, provoking many to join the rebels. The country had returned to civilian rule in 1983, but rather than address the Kurds’ many legitimate grievances, a move that might have defused the escalating conflict early on, the new government met violence with violence, instituting a massive military buildup and counterinsurgency campaign in the Southeast. As early as 1986, forty-five thousand Turkish troops were stationed in Kurdistan, a figure that would grow to two hundred thousand by the early 1990s.
In 1988, the conflict entered a new, more tragic stage, as casualties began to mount. The PKK began burning Kurdish schools and assassinating Kurdish teachers and civil servants, accusing them of promulgating the government line. The guerrilla group was now also in the habit of arriving in villages and demanding food, shelter, and money. Villagers who did not cooperate were severely beaten and, in some cases, massacred. Some teenage boys and young men were kidnapped and forced to join the guerrillas.
The villagers found themselves in an untenable position. If they refused to cooperate with the PKK, they suffered brutal reprisals. But if they did cooperate, they suffered equally horrific consequences. Martial law was now in effect throughout the Southeast, and the Turkish military forces had sweeping powers. Without warning, gendarmes would suddenly descend upon Kurdish villages to beat, arrest, torture, and, in some incidences, slaughter innocent victims. Suspects could be retained for thirty days without trial; press reports regarding the state violence were banned; people could be deported out of the region at the governor-general’s will.
The campaign to recruit village guards also escalated. Each community was expected to provide a platoon of men, who were armed and paid by the local gendarmes, to keep the PKK out of their village. Communities who refused to become village guards were viewed as PKK sympathizers and subject to yet more violence.
The Kurds became a deeply divided community, with some families supporting the PKK, others becoming village guards, and others still trying to remain neutral. But as the Turkish government did absolutely nothing to protect its ordinary Kurdish civilians—most nonliterate and living in numbing poverty, with a per capita income less than half the national average— and the military committed human rights abuse after human rights abuse, grassroots support for the PKK grew. Young women as well as men joined the movement, which ev
entually recruited over thirty thousand guerrillas between 1984 and 1999, and more Kurds began speaking out. The failure of the Turkish government to extend aid to the Iraqi Kurdish refugees crossing into Turkey post–Gulf War also inflamed many Kurds in Turkey, who ultimately extended that aid themselves. The PKK’s image in the Southeast slowly began to change from that of a marginal outlaw group into one of a nationalist movement.
In 1991, the ban on the Kurdish language was lifted and the government made some gestures toward the Southeast, saying that it would “recognize the Kurdish reality.” But at the same time, the infamous antiterror law was implemented and bloody attacks by both sides confounded any moves toward reconciliation. Popular demonstrations broke out. Villagers who refused to become village guards disappeared, assassinations took place on public streets in broad daylight, and the destruction of the villages dramatically escalated. Before 1992, about three hundred villages had been destroyed; between 1992 and 1995, that number grew to over three thousand, as hundreds of thousands of villagers saw their homes burned to the ground, their crops destroyed, and their animals confiscated before their eyes; some saw loved ones killed.
The brutal work of the PKK also continued. Between 1992 and 1995, the group is believed by Human Rights Watch to have committed at least 768 extra-judicial executions, including teachers, civil servants, and political opponents, along with some children and elderly men and women. Nonetheless, the Kurds’ support for the PKK grew exponentially, as pride in Kurdish nationalism soared, even among the many millions who deplored the group’s tactics and had no interest in Marxism or separatism. Whatever its faults, the PKK promised to deliver what had hitherto been only a dream: equal civil liberties and the right to call oneself “Kurd.”
Inflaming the Kurds’ escalating nationalism was the increasingly well-documented fact that the Kurdish countryside was being destroyed primarily by the Turkish military, not the PKK, as the government liked to claim. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report, typical of many similar reports released over the past decade, reads: “Most displaced [Kurds in Turkey] were driven from their homes by government gendarmes and by ‘village guards’ ” in “an arbitrary and violent campaign marked by hundreds of ‘disappearances’ and summary executions.”
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 39